City Transit Rider Tweets: Understanding Sentiments and Politeness

ABSTRACT

With the expanding popularity of Web 2.0, there has been a huge surge in the use of social media, like Twitter, to express user sentiments or opinions. Delays and breakdowns in transit operations can make riders annoyed and irritated, and as a result, they express their anger and frustration via social media posts. Understanding the tipping points of public frustration will help in developing better solutions. This study aims to develop a framework by developing multilevel sentiment analysis and determine the emotion and politeness measures using transit-related tweets from New York (New York City) and California (San Francisco). The popular hashtags associated with the transit systems of New York and California were collected during 2019. The words associated with negative sentiments widely differ in these two states. Moderate levels of differences are seen in the politeness measures for these two states. Additionally, co-occurrence measures associated with negative emotions identified unique issues based on the demographics. This study demonstrates that Twitter provides a great opportunity to understand the public perception of transit, and the findings can help authorities design a more efficient transit system to improve user experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• Twitter
• transit
• sentiment analysis
• politeness measure

Acknowledgments

The authors would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers. We have tried to incorporate as many as possible of their insightful suggestions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Subasish Das

Subasish Das, is an assistant research scientist with Texas A&M Transportation Institute in Bryan, Texas.

Hamsa Abbas Zubaidi

Hamsa Abbas Zubaidi, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Civil and Construction Engineering Department at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon.